Dark Room

A free new tool for anyone interested in distraction-free writing on a Windows computer: Dark Room, a Windows version of the free Mac program WriteRoom. Dark Room allows for distraction-free writing with minimal editing capabilities — cut, copy, paste, undo, redo. (WriteRoom has more options.)

What makes Dark Room different from a text-editor: the full-screen mode removes access to the desktop, so that there's nothing but a blank "page" — no titlebar, no taskbar, nothing to pull you away from writing. And full-screen mode keeps the "page" in the middle of the screen (very different from writing in a text-editor with a maximized window, with text running the width of the screen). DarkRoom's defaults are old school — green text with a black page and black background, but colors and margin settings (along with font style and size) can be changed to your liking. And you can toggle between fullscreen mode and a smaller, conventional window with F11.

I love the idea of a computer program emulating a typewriter (the Mac program Blockwriter, in development, goes further, removing cut and paste.) And I find it interesting that as Microsoft Office is on the verge of becoming even more visually complicated, people are creating alternatives for writing that function with extreme simplicity.

Related blog post
» My version of "Amish computing"

Links
» Dark Room (requires .NET Framework 2.0)
» WriteRoom
» Blockwriter
» Microsoft Office 2007 (Wikipedia article with screenshots)

Playing in Peoria

All your needs in one place: hair, sportswear, and martial-arts instruction.

[Photo taken in Peoria, Illinois, by Rachel Leddy]

Jumping out of Windows

A while ago I installed Ubuntu on an old laptop (thereby bringing an antique back to life). This past weekend, I wiped out Windows XP and installed Ubuntu on our family desktop computer. So with five computers in our family, the score is now Windows XP 3, Ubuntu 2. Our absolute reliance on Windows has come to an end.

The care and feeding of our family's computers has always fallen to me, and over the past six or seven years I've reinstalled Windows 98 and XP on various computers at least six or seven times. No matter how careful we are, problems, mysterious, impossible ones, appear. That's what happened this past weekend — bewildering freezes that could only be undone by disabling our wireless connection. Our arsenal of anti-malware, anti-spyware, and anti-virus programs could find nothing wrong; restoring the system with ERUNT was no help. The only way to resolve this problem was to reinstall Windows. That would have meant getting all of SP2 (an endless download), patching XP to allow a custom theme, reinstalling dozens of programs, tweaking all sorts of settings — in short, giving up a day or more to bring the computer back from the dead. And for what? I'd likely be doing it all again a year or so from now. So with my family's blessing, I went for Ubuntu.

Switching was simple. Wiping the hard drive and installing Ubuntu (from one CD) took about thirty minutes. (The installation includes Firefox, the GIMP, OpenOffice.org, and other programs.) As with the old laptop, establishing the wireless connection was a simple matter, and the system recognized and installed our printer in less than fifteen seconds. Updating Ubuntu and adding some programs from online "repositories" was quite straightforward and also took very little time.

Is everything perfect? No. The major problem thus far is that Suspend and Hibernate don't work, so all we can do is leave the computer running or shut it off. Ubuntu starts up and shuts down very quickly, so even this problem doesn't seem crucial. (It's widespread, so I hope that it will be solved with an update). I miss the backup service Mozy, though the Firefox extension Gmail Space gives us free online storage via a Gmail account (alas without automation). I'd like to have a program similar to AllChars, so that I can add em dashes in text files and type, say, /link and have the appropriate HTML for a link appear. (I would think that such a program must exist, but I haven't found it.) And there are various small issues that should get resolved as I learn more about Ubuntu. There is, yes, a learning curve, at least for the person who's maintaining the computer. I need to learn, for instance, about the advantages or disadvantages of partitioning our hard drive (I know how to partition; I just don't know whether it's appropriate to do so). The Ubuntu forums, easily searched, have already provided answers for many questions.

I suspect that as everyday computer users think carefully about the costs and complications of "upgrading" to Windows Vista and Office 2007 (both hideous, from the many screenshots I've seen), Ubuntu will become increasingly popular. I'd go so far as to predict a near-future in which many households are running at least one computer with a free operating system. It's relatively easy to jump out of Windows and land on your feet.

Link » Ubuntu

Water-slide, syllables added to pool

Our town pool has been renamed an "aquatic center." But that doesn't mean that we will be swimming with sharks. According to our local newspaper, the change of name is meant to show that there's more to the pool than a pool. There is also a water-slide.

Poem of the day

The Fourth

Valid hunches are rampant in this house,
like the one that just was — this past one,
every other word! — a rich explosive field
at whose center a romantic American
attempts to speak to a not-yet-romantic
(but soon-to-be) American, & no,
I would not like a piece of "funeral pie,"
we'll all be stiff soon enough, mind you,
"after postponing the obvious."
Little town, your shades are down,
you can tell, I know, no more.

[I wrote "The Fourth" on a late-20th-century Fourth of July.]

Fred Willard

"A few years ago," he said, after a moment, "I was in Cleveland, where I grew up, and I looked up my dad's death certificate at City Hall. I was twelve when he died, in 1951. He died after dropping off Christmas gifts to a customer — he worked at a financing company, it was all a little vague. They said he usually turned to wave after he got in his car, and this time he didn't. Heart failure. I went down to the intersection listed on the certificate, a Buick dealership, and it was very touching. He was Fred Willard, and I was Fred Willard. He was a pretty stern guy, though. I don't remember much joking, never much encouragement. My wife hates all these visits, going to see the graves. 'The people aren't there!' she says. And I say, 'But this is the closest we can get to them.'" He gazed out at Times Square, perhaps seeing past the JumboTron dazzle to the Tenderloin of decades past. "If it was up to me, nothing would ever change, no one would ever die. On the other hand," he added, "then no one could have babies, either, because it would get too crowded."

From a conversation with Fred Willard, in this week's New Yorker.

You may know Willard as Mike LaFontaine (A Mighty Wind), Buck Laughlin (Best in Show), or Ron Albertson (Waiting for Guffman). Readers of a certain age (and comic sensibility) will also remember him as Jerry Hubbard on Fernwood 2Nite.

Fred Willard, Tourist (from The New Yorker)

Volume control

Many years ago, there was an amazing invention. It was called a volume knob.

From a thoughtful piece on the superiority of analog design.

Link » Redesigning Volume Buttons, Old Style (from Humanized, "a small company based in Chicago concerned with making the computer experience better")

Proust: Places in space and time

The last words of Swann's Way:

The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 444

I wish I'd known Swann's Way when I was visiting old neighborhoods last summer.

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

Movie recommendations: Vittorio De Sica

As I often remind my students, people come to works of art when they do. If you've never read Homer or Dante (or Proust) before, so what? You can start now.

In that spirit, my wife Elaine and I have been putting together our own private Vittorio De Sica festival via our university library (which is in fact a cosmopolitan video-store in disguise). The De Sica films that we've seen have been heartbreaking. They're not melodramatic, not sentimental. They're filled with the sorrow that follows from individual and institutional wrongdoing. Here are three recommendations:

Ladri di biciclette [The bicycle thief], 1948. The Bicycle Thief is a movie "everyone" is supposed to have seen — the trailer for a mid-1970s reissue (available on the DVD) gives a good idea of the high regard in which it's held. The scene is post-war Rome. A man gets work as a poster-hanger, work that requires a bicycle. On his first day of work, his bicycle is stolen. He and his son search for it. Now get the film and see what happens.

My favorite moment: father Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani) and son Bruno (Enzo Staiola) happily packing away their lunches of frittati ("omelets," according to the subtitle) before going to work. It's astonishing to learn that neither Maggiorani nor Staiola had acted professionally before.

Sciuscià [Shoeshine], 1946. Two shoeshine boys, Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi) and Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni), are arrested for selling two stolen Allied blankets and end up in a grim prison for minors, where their friendship is undone. One striking moment: Pasquale's lawyer dons his courtroom robe with great difficulty and, like every other adult in the film, fails the child who trusts him.

The videotape that we watched (from Balzac Video) uses a wretched, unrestored print with sparse subtitles. I can't tell whether that's what is currently offered for $59.99 on the sketchy Balzac Video webpage.

I Bambini ci guardano [The children are watching us], 1944. A mother's infidelity and a father's despair, seen through the eyes of their young son Pricò (Luciano De Ambrosis). The final scene is unforgettable. This film is available in a beautiful restoration from from the Criterion Collection.

The title of this last film applies to all three — the children are watching us, looking to us always, so we grown-ups had better make sure to do the right thing.

Overheard

Outside a library, one person speaking to another, with great emphasis:

You can MAKE, a MONTH, as an ASSISTANT, fifty-thousand DOLLARS.

Sounds as though someone is being invited to ascend the pyramid.

Link » Previous "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)